Twitter’s Missing Feature: An “Anti-RT”

This Tweet is for illustration purposes. I got no problem with it.

My colleague Mike Calore has done a great hands-on with the new Twitter, which I’m also lucky enough to have received early. One feature that immediately stands out, though: it’s infinitely easier to manage who you follow. It is one, long scroll, no page turning, and one click to send someone into the cornfield. I predict lots and lots of unfollowing will ensue as the new web interface rolls out.

But there is another feature that has nothing to do with interface that this new interface has somehow suggested to me is missing: A way to let someone know that you don’t like their Tweet — an “anti-RT.”

Presently, one needs to engage the sender, with a mention, which can just begin a conversation (and feed a troll). Twitter lacks a meaningful way to, in effect, vote down a comment, to let the world know you think this something is idiotic without sharing it. Ideally, anyone seeing a Tweet with negatives in the timeline would see how many disapprovals there are, so it wouldn’t have to be RT’d just to make the point that nobody should really be reading it at all.

I think what makes this suddenly an obvious good thing to have is the double-paging, which shows activity around a given Tweet — who has RT’d it, and what they have said. This would be a perfect place to show how many people disapprove, and a place to let them.

Voting down is now a very common feature in a number of commenting systems, but was of course pioneered by the URL sharing sites Digg and Reddit. Conceptually, it can be the same on Twitter, it seems to me. But I may be missing something, or a clever unadvertised way of already doing it. So set me straight if I should be making myself another Americano rather than rattling off at the mouth.